It seems odd to me that so few critics have remarked on the
sexual aspect of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill: Volume
2 — or Kill Bill: Volume 1 for that matter. Over
and over again we are told by those who, one is uncharitably
disposed to suspect, want to show off their own knowledge of junk
cinema that the allusive Mr Tarantino is quoting, here, from this
Kung Fu flick of the 1970s or, there, from a spaghetti Western of
the 1960s. Yet one after another of them neglects to mention this
salient difference between QT and his myriad models. His hero,
played by Uma Thurman, is a girl. Most likely film critics, who
tend to be a pretty p.c. bunch, think it in slightly bad taste to
mention this. So what if she’s a girl? Or rather, a woman? Why
shouldn’t she be? We don’t think — do we? — that women are any
less capable than men of killing people with their specially made
samurai swords.
Was it then just coincidence that the heroes of all those other
films were men? Or was it merely the force of unthinking habit
and prejudice on the part of their creators that made all those
earlier incarnations of the solitary avengers and seekers after
honor into men? There may be critics who think this, but Quentin
Tarantino himself does not. Or so I infer from his exploitation
of the role’s sexual incongruousness for humorous purposes.
Clearly, the whole point of the film is to take an old-fashioned
chivalric model and, by putting a woman in the role of the knight
in armor, at a stroke to make it all hip and ironic.
For it is not just martial arts epics and B-pictures from the
1950s that Tarantino quotes from. There is also the whole genre
of cheesy, post-modern tough-gal movies of the 1990s from La
Femme Nikita (and its dreadful American re-make, Point
of No Return) to Charlie’s Angels. These began the
practice of pretending not to notice anything out of order when
beautiful, slightly-built young women beat the tar out of much
larger and nastier men, and Tarantino is paying them his usual
affectionate tribute. But he is doing so with a purpose.
Repeatedly, he makes a joke out the heroine’s gender, even in her
name, now revealed as Beatrix Kiddo, which incarnates both her
creator’s ironic take on Dante and the patronizing slang of male
heroes of the movies of the 1940s and 50s to their devoted female
accessories, here used by an unexpectedly literal Bill (David
Carradine).
Likewise, we are meant to laugh when Bea says to Elle Driver
(Darryl Hannah), both of them armed with special swords made by
Hattori Hanzo, just before their big showdown: “Just between us
girls, what did you say to Pai Mei to make him put out your eye?”
But the best joke of all comes at the end when Beatrix bursts in
upon Bill, hot to take her long-sought revenge, and finds him
playing with the four year old daughter, B.B. (Perla
Haney-Jardine), she gave birth to after being shot by him. “Bang,
bang,” says the child pointing a toy gun at her: “You’re dead,
mommy.”Tarantino could not have been unaware of the cultural
resonances of this scene. Conscientious feminists who, aware of
the connections between male socialization and violence, refuse
to allow their sons to play with guns, or anything that can be
made to resemble a gun, must be terribly conflicted about this
indication that the child, like her mother, is being molded by
Bill into a girl at home with a boy’s game.
Moreover, it turns out that the mainspring of the whole
multi-volume cinematic gore-fest was Beatrix’s decision, at the
very moment of discovering her pregnancy, to spare her child this
initiation into the mystery of the assassin’s craft. “I didn’t
want you to claim her,” she tells Bill before their
final showdown. “She deserved to be born with a clean slate.”
What is being revenged, therefore, is not just Bill’s shooting up
Bea’s wedding party and leaving her for dead but all men who
mistreat and abandon women and children and perhaps Tarantino’s
own fatherless childhood. Underneath all the ironic chivalry
there is a real chivalry that Tarantino has often plainly
acknowledged.
The film also belongs to another genre much exampled during the
1990s: movies which celebrate the romance of single motherhood.
Here, mommy kills daddy with the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart
trick, sheds a few tears and then happily begins life alone with
her child who, remember, “deserves a clean slate.” The closing
credits identify her as: “Beatrix Kiddo/aka Black Mamba/aka
Mommy,” announcing in high-flown comic book style that “The
lioness has joined her cub and all is well in the jungle.” But
the comic book trappings, like the gender dislocation, suggest
that it is all unreal and meant to be seen as unreal. Or, as Mr.
Tarantino puts it: “Violence is the funnest thing you can do at
the movies.” At the movies, maybe, but not anywhere else. That’s
how we know that in Kill Bill, as in his movie-besotted
childhood, Tarantino is seeking refuge from reality in pulp
fiction.
